Does the Cloud ‘Break’ Virtualization Licensing?

There’s ongoing discussion of whether enterprise companies will make the leap to the cloud. But what about virtualization licensing? Is virtualization licensing “broken” when it comes to the cloud? Steve O’Donnell tackles the subject over at The Hot Aisle, discussing the forumulas used by virtualization vendors to bill for their software.

The whole thing is a mess and no vendor seems to have got it completely right. The key issue is to strike a fair balance between the intellectual property rights of the vendor to be rewarded for their investment in development and support of the code and the customers need to operate in a flexible way that minimizes their operational costs. In the end market forces will prevail and we will see much more flexible approaches like server farm licensing for large scale applications like SharePoint, Oracle Databases, and SQL Server. Part of the problem is fair licensing is hard for the vendor to implement in the cloud.

About the Author

Rich Miller is the founder and editor at large of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.

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Is virtualization licensing "broken" when it comes to the cloud? Steve O'Donnell tackles the subject over at The Hot Aisle, discussing the forumulas used by virtualization vendors to bill for their software. Read More